cover image Bernard Berenson Coll Oriental

Bernard Berenson Coll Oriental

Laurence Roberts, Villa I Tatti. Hudson Hills Press, $50 (112pp) ISBN 978-1-55595-060-6

Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) is best known as a critic and collector of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, yet his keen eye for quality, beauty and dynamic equilibrium also informed his collection of Oriental art. Permanently on view in Villa I Tatti--once his home near Florence, now headquarters of Harvard's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies--the collection's 43 objects are reproduced in this handsome catalogue. The 33 Chinese artworks range from a Neolithic jade vessel to scrolls, tomb figurines, a magnificent gilt-bronze altarpiece dated 529 A.D. and a 19-century bodhisattva. The remaining pieces include Khmer stone heads, a serene Thai Buddha, a Tibetan rolled painting, a graceful Japanese statuette of a celestial being and a volanic stone Buddha believed to be from Borobudur, the huge central Javanese temple built in the eight and ninth centuries. Roberts, a specialist in Japanese art, provides informative facing-page commentaries for each plate. (Feb.)